Four Thousand Pieces

We met outside the morgue. You were there with your hair too bright and clothes that we had fought over that very morning. You were crouched, your body looking impossibly small and broken. 

You can't wear that out. You look like a prostitute.
I'm eighteen years old Mum, I can wear what I like.

All at once you were the brand new baby that I had held in my arms, sobbing over the tiny miracle that your Father and I had never thought possible. Then, you were five years old, and it was time to begin school. You had looked up at me with big green eyes and a serious smile as you proved over and over that you could fasten the Velcro on your brand new shoes.

You smiled at me now, outside this place that we didn't belong in, and I saw the stabilisers that Gary had taken from your bike. He had watched you cycle down the road, ten years old, the proudest Father at that moment in time. I could tell you that he hid tears from you that day. But I don't.

Instead I ask you how your day was, and you smile at me again. The noises around us are fading in and out. In and out. The sounds of the hospital are quiet when you smile. As the tears fall from your eyes though, they get louder. I wish that everybody would quieten so I can hear your voice, hear what you so desperately want to say. What I so desperately want to make up any reply possible to.

You grab my hand and whisper now, I'm scared Mum.

I try to smile, try to reassure you. Try to give you the world and everything else in my power but that's not happening anymore. Someone opens the door and says, Can you identify the bodies now please? It's a warm voice, full of sadness and regret, but with a firmness that can't be ignored. We all step through the doors together and the cold air hits. You shiver and for a second my heart leaps at this ordinary, humanistic thing.

This is too cold to be hell. You joke, your bright hair swinging past your face as you laugh lightly.

I don't smile, the white sheet-covered bodies lying side by side cannot make me smile. We move forward together, our hands still entwined.

I'm so sorry for your loss the woman mutters but we don't see her now.

Gary is behind us, he's sobbing and I know it's the first time you ever saw him do that. His grief is infallible. The woman, the only woman of living flesh in his life now, peels back the sheets without asking his permission.

We lie there, you and I.


I wonder if you knew all along that this was our existence now. That we had become another news headline, another fatality and another statistic.

I didn't tell you before, because I didn't want it to be true. I whisper to you achingly. The reality was that I hadn't told you because I didn't want you to be mad at me. I wanted us to do this together, bound by love instead of fear.

We are the testimony of our family car now broken in two, three, four thousand pieces. Your face is no longer perfect and mine is no longer there. Gary's eyes cast over the rings on my hand and my mind sprints back to that day twenty years ago. He looks at me now and if I had eyes, I would have gazed back at him fiercely.  But there is nothing left. He can't grasp that these bodies are his girls. There is no recognition on his face.

I take your hand silently and we slip into ourselves without looking back. This is our place. We are no longer of this world. Together, we become a lifetime of grief.